My very first impressions from the course: I feel a little uncomfortable with the variety of connection places that, in theory, we should manage.

This is causing me some anxiety: is it preferable to post here, in my blog, or is it better to discuss in the Moodle forum? Or should I post here and then put a link to the post in the forum, or in the Facebook group? And how will we struggle with the overwhelming quantity of information that will be arriving from our mates?

I started to read the papers for the week but I’m not already able to make a relevant post on content.

For now, I’m jumping from the course blog to the wiki to the Moodle forums to the Google Map, and following the links, and looking at the Italian community (yes… one more space), and… only a look to Facebook and.. I’ve not yet tried to play with CMap.

Maybe I’m just more connected than yesterday, but (for now) I haven’t learnt anything…

9 Responses to “CCK08 – Week 1 – Too much connected?”

it is overwhelming but this is the ususal style of these virtual events…many venues. I think it is done in order to give you the option to choose which venue you want to use and also to give you “un bel’assaggio” of all that is going around lately.

I personally find it fun and just surf them all until I find one that I like. I can understand how it may be even more overwhelming for the language. This is how I felt when I started taking post graduate courses (taught by people like you!) until gradually the language problem faded.

I personally am not attracted to the CMap…something about conceptual maps…I hate maps. Well, Italian friends, how nice to see you here and share my thoughts!!

I can understand feeling overwhelmed. Your post and others reminds me of the navigational literacies we acquire through our lived experiences of in this case all this digital “Web2.0-ness”.
One of my more significant reads this morning was a pdf file of a book chapter by Roy Pea on distributed intelligence. I’d have to look back at where it was located in the course or maybe who put it there. An important part of the connectedness seems to be sensing the relevance of location. If I had seen the book on the shelves of my library I would be thinking very differently about its content.

I don’t believe that you “haven’t learnt anything”.
Perhaps no facts that could already be tested in an assessment. But certainly some neural connections have become a little stronger, and when you do the described jumping again they will gradually grow until the connections across the sites’ labyrinth become familiar.
I think this type of a distributed learning environment that you are immersed into, is a big portion of what is supposed to be learned in this course.

I do wonder whether part of this goes back to those ancient models of group dynamics “forming, storming, norming and performing”. Whilst I think those models are classically mis-applied, they do seem to say a lot about those initial stages of group formation where everyone is trying desparately to establish themselves and to find a way of relating to others.